Monday, June 29

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't see the appeal in downloading anything "forbidden" for free. I did use Napster back when it wasn't a big corporate entity, but even then I'd primarily search for rare b-sides or live tracks. Downloading whole albums was no fun and what's the deal with movies?

Sure, you'll find a bunch of rare flicks, but it sucks the fun out of digging and searching, sometimes for years, for a real copy. That and digital copies on hard drives are worthless with wildly wavering quality. This especially holds true for recent releases. Nothing like watching a low quality, heavily compressed video on a monitor through shit speakers. I'd rather buy old VHS dups from establishments like Video Search of Miami from back when the Internet was in its infancy than do it the easy digital way. There's nothing like finally uncovering that "holy grail" either by a fluke on an e-tailer or in a dingy cardboard box at a yard sale.

So no, don't ask me for torrent links because I have no idea. Hard copies rule the day.

I've used torrents for 2 films, neither of which have ever been released in any format in the U.S. One had never been released in any country as far as I could tell, and the other had only been released in France and I couldn't find a copy except on a torrent. Otherwise I'd never touch torrents, they have all the disadvantages you name and then some.

At 50 years of age, I spent so many hours and so many thousands of dollars on used VHS, I welcome torrents.Most look fine, only crap files with lousy encoding look all pixelated. A good rip looks very nice indeed, and a decent rip off of an OOP PAL VHS looks better and any VHS dub ever could ( never mind a second or thrud gen dub )Also torrents are a godsend for TV broadcasts from around the globe.Discounting torrents is wildly foolish as you'll cut yourself off from many a treat.Not to mention the prolifferation of fandubbed and fansubbed projects!I love my VHS colection but have not bought a tape in a couple years and it's safe to say I never will again.Torrents are your friend...really.